It was the fancy little side-tables that really sold it to me. That tender touch that means so much. Having been handed a glass of wine at my seat, out comes a flip-up surface to put it on. It's only then you realise the advantage of the double-sized legroom — people can get past you without all that jump-up-and-squeeze-past annoyance of the traditional cinema experience.

This is the Everyman Belsize Park; the newest cinema in the country. Until recently it was called the Screen on the Hill; the local cinema of the NW3 set, just around the corner from Supernova Heights and Helena Bonham Carter's gaff. Strangely, under the previous management, it could claim to be the country's leading kosher cinema — alongside the actor-fluff and music-industry degenerates, Belsize Park contains a sizeable if ageing Jewish community, and the Screen on the Hill could be relied on to book the new Woody Allen film when no one else would.

Now, though, it's been taken over and kitted out by the same people who turned the Everyman cinema, up the hill in Hampstead proper, into a boutique movie theatre with wide, wide sofa seats and refreshments served direct to the auditorium. Clearly it's part of the modern fad for what we might call the adulting of cinemagoing — along with no-kids screenings and the Smoking Cabinet series. This, of course, is in stark contrast to the multiplex revolution of the 1990s, which saw rep cinemas (like the Everyman itself) massacred and bright, shiny multi-screened establishments take the frenetic route into bamboozling the clientele into thinking they were having a good time.

It comes at a price, of course, but as several West End cinemas charge the frankly staggering sum of £12 for admittance, at least you get a bit more for a similar amount of money. The film they put on the night I was there was a preview of the Sean Penn vehicle, Milk — I don't know if it was the sharp decor or the club class seating, but it certainly seemed like a step forward in cinematic evolution to me. I'll be back, for sure.